
The Art of Politics
In an "Ideal" Society
By Judy Osborne
In the most favorite theme of transgender fiction, a powerful (but caring) woman forces a poor hapless guy to transform himself (with her help) into a person of feminine beauty. It’s a wonderful fantasy that places all the blame for violating gender taboos on somebody else.
Small wonder, then, that we like scientific theories that say nature made us who we are. The theories take us off the hook, make us blameless in our own eyes.
The last few years have seen a small flood of such theories. Anne Moir in Brain Sex and Simon LeVay in The Sexual Brain reported evidence that gender identity and sexual orientation are irretrievably set, during two adjacent weeks of pregnancy, by the presence or absence of a testosterone bath which floods the brain at specific times. Since the flood doesn’t always happen at the socially-acceptable moments, or maybe not at all, gay people and transpeople sometimes are born into this world.
LeVay went further to find that a region of the brain involved with sexual behavior and feelings is about twice as large in heterosexual men as it is in gay men and women. He didn’t check t-people, but one transgendered physician has been looking at the brains of live TS subjects using magnetic resonance imaging. Rumor has it she’s finding that our brains resemble those of the women and gay men.
Going one step further, could a transgender gene be found lurking somewhere in our DNA? Genealogical studies have pinpointed extended families which have produced more gay men than normal over the years. Investigators have tracked the fact that gayness is passed through generations by the mothers, a finding which spawns the notion that a gay gene is hiding somewhere in the x chromosome.
One researcher even claims to have found a t-gene. Dr. Wei-Fun Cho sampled Singapore’s large population of socially visible t-people to find such a gene, though other researchers have not yet replicated the finding.
Studies observing infants as early as 52 hours after birth, and continuing until cultural conditioning begins to gum up the research, show that little girls and little boys do and like different things. Such findings lend credence to the idea that gender identity is wired into the brain before birth.
Much publicity was generated recently about a boy whose penis was damaged just after birth during circumcision. Surgeons, in their god-like wisdom, installed female anatomy. The "girl" never accepted his gender and at fourteen, after a suicide attempt, learned of the secret procedure. He began taking testosterone, got married, and at 30 he’s the proud and happy father of adopted children.
All this activity makes it a virtual certainty that some researcher will come up with a smoking-gun gene or hormone bath or brain anomaly that says it’s not our fault. And won’t it be wonderful to get off the hook -- to discover that our t-ness is caused by factors beyond our control. Nobody will dare put us down any more in this era of political correctness. It’s almost as good as living our favorite fantasy in real-life (except that we lack that helpful and caring lady).
We can come out of our closets and still have secure jobs. Medical insurance will pay to correct our bodies and fix other disabilities that keep us from fully living our lives. The religious right will stop talking about our "lifestyle choices" and recognize our need to be the people we are. Instead of marginalizing us, society will accept us into its arms with sympathy and understanding.
Well maybe, but society has a history of fixing "problems" once scientists find their cause. Discover a gene and obstetricians will check for it in the amniotic fluid. Parents might be heartbroken at the thought, but wouldn’t it be better to abort the fetus and try another time for a baby who wouldn’t have to face our pain? The central theme of The Twilight of the Gods offers a chilling view of a family’s dilemma when they discover, through genetic testing, that their son will be born gay.
Suppose the testosterone bath isn’t drawn at the right time for a boy baby, or happens when it shouldn’t for a girl? No problem for the boy baby -- just inject enough testosterone to make sure he’s swamped with the stuff. That way he’ll turn into a real-man man. While it might be slightly more difficult to get rid of the testosterone when a girl baby gets an unwelcome bath -- not to worry -- science will find a way.
It’s a scary thought that all our diversity might be lost through insidious little events like these. A diffuse and unruly population is much more likely to achieve a rich culture and a free society.
For me, I wouldn’t trade all the pain of being different for all the joys of my unruly life. How sad that our own beautiful culture, and the rich world created by gays and lesbians, could be wiped out bit by bit by tiny decisions affecting people who are not yet people.
Nazi Germany tried to stamp out diversity and create a "master race" as part of their plan to establish the world’s first "ideal" society. The free world quite properly thought it was a bad idea and fought a war over the it. The religious right isn’t too crazy about diverse and unruly people either. Dictators like populations which reflect their official values in rigidly-uniform ways. That way, the few who deviate from those values can be dealt with swiftly and effectively.
Is it realistic to assume that the religious right will leave us alone if our t-ness and gay-ness turn out to be not our fault? We already have an answer in the words of the Rev. Louis Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition: "The fact that homosexuality may be genetically based will not make much difference for us from a public policy perspective."
Frank Clark of the conservative Center for Values goes a step further. "By identifying these poor fellows early," he says, "...we may even have the possibility to use gene therapy to help cure them of this terrible affliction." God doesn’t make mistakes, but if God happens to create a few t-people, it sounds as if the religious right plans to fix them.
Perhaps the precursor to an "ideal" society can be found in Singapore. The political imperative there is described in the words of Dr. Cho: "In Singapore, we care deeply about the orderliness of society." Dr. Cho feels optimistic that "It should be possible, via amniocentesis, to identify those who are possible deviants before birth, so they can be effectively dealt with, maybe before birth."
Imagine what an "ideal" society a dictator could build some day by wiping out all the inconvenient differences before little anarchists like us are even born.
Comments, including critical ones, are most welcome. Please e-mail your thoughts to me at heyjude@eskimo.com.
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